A blog about evolution, anthropology, and science, inspired by the three Georges: Gaylord Simpson, Carlin, and S. Kaufman.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

The Times, it is Outragin’

We’ve
never settled the question of just what science in anthropology actually
is. I don’t think anybody is against it,
but the problem is that the people who have always claimed most
self-consciously to speak for it have an absolutely awful track record.

We
can start with Ernst Haeckel, great German biologist. Haeckel had such a hard-on for Darwin that he
believed Darwinism would produce ‘‘an important and fruitful reform of
anthropology. From this new theory of man, there will be developed a new
philosophy, not like most of the airy systems of metaphysical speculation
hitherto prevalent, but one founded upon the solid ground of comparative
zoology.’’

Problem
was that Haeckel’s Darwinism incorporated the idea that life progressed from
amoebas to the Nordic military state, and he saw other human populations as
different species, occupying places at varying distances from the apes. In a nutshell, Haeckel’s “solid ground”
eventually produced the worst anthropology our science has ever known. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz camp doctor, was
an MD/PhD. His doctorate was in
scientific anthropology.

Yes,
mistakes were made in the name of scientific anthropology. People were objectified, robbed of their
humanity, because anthropologists wanted to be scientists, like biologists. The problem is that biologists have an
advantage, in that they have established an intellectual distance between
themselves and the things they study – subject/object, scientist/fruitfly. But anthropologists don’t study things, they
study people (or animals very much like people).

To
regard people as if they were not people is objectification. It is repugnant in modern cultural life, and
it is a false proposition as science, because, in a nutshell, people really are
people. So, as a scientist working on
people, you have three choices. Either
you can pretend that they’re not people (evil), or you can pretend that you are
not a person (stupid), or you can acknowledge that the classic subject/object
distinction that is fundamental to classical science simply breaks down
here. That is eventually what Martin
Arrowsmith realized (medical researcher, not an anthropologist, but the point
holds) in the famous 1925 novel by Sinclair Lewis. You can’t pretend you are not human, and you
can’t pretend they are not human, but somehow you still have to do your
scientific work as rigorously as possible, confronting the culture in your
science as fairly as possible. This
science is reflexive.

By
breaking down the subject/object distinction, this science assumes a position
not only in the natural universe but in the moral universe as well. Its founder, the Quaker Oxford professor E.
B. Tylor, wrote at the end of Primitive Culture (1871) that this is “a
reformer’s science.” Its statements have
political valence, and to say that they don’t is itself a statement of
political valence.

Mistakes
were made. Franz Boas made them, trying
to be scientific about the New York Eskimos around 1900. The eugenicists made them, the scientific racists
made them. We all make them. The point about science is that it progresses
on the basis of previous mistakes. But you
don’t get to make the same mistakes over and over in science; you only get to
make new and creative mistakes.

That’s
the problem with the newest flareup about science in anthropology and the
Yanomamo. Mistakes were made. We’ve learned from them and we’ve moved
on. So why haven’t Napoleon Chagnon and
The New York Times? Why are they frozen in
ideas about anthropological science from the 1970s? Why does Napoleon Chagnon compare himself to
Indiana Jones, in the very first paragraph of Emily Eakin’s New York Times article? Does he not realize that it’s not a
compliment in this day and age? Indiana
Jones was a looter, and archaeologists vigorously protested the representation
of their field in the first movie.

Why
does Nicholas Wade say, lauding Chagnon, that the Yanomamo live “in a state of
nature”? Twice? Using steel axes and practicing horticulture
is not a state of nature. (Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University pointed this out in a letter.) They are cultural, very cultural, as cultural
as you and me.

Remember, though, that Nicholas Wade is on record as an anthropology-denier. In an interview with the Anthropology News in 2007, he told them , "Anyone who’s interested in cultural anthropology should escape as quickly as they can from their cultural anthropology department and go and learn some genetics, which will be the foundation of cultural anthropology in the future."

The
first thing about being a scientist is to get your facts straight. The imaginary “man” who lived in a “state of
nature” was a common enough theme in the French Enlightenment, but it was
recognized as a pre-modern myth by the turn of the twentieth century. All cultures are cultural. All groups of people regulate social
interactions, communicate symbolically, cook, prettify themselves, and transform
intrinsically useless natural objects into useful cultural ones. (As Jane Goodall showed decades ago, even
chimps do a little of that.)

And
people have been doing those things since before they were people. All living people are in a state of nature/culture. Nobody is in a state of nature. In fact we don’t even know what such a state of
pure nature would be like, because it contains an inherent contradiction – trying
to imagine people who aren’t people.

There
are all kinds of issues entangled in the Yanomamo business: research ethics; a
bizarre book published in 2000, abstracted first in The New Yorker, called Darkness
in El Dorado; sociobiology; the intersection of science and political
ideology; and the welfare of indigenous peoples. I am going to focus on two issues: first, the
claim that empirically Napoleon Chagnon linked murder with reproductive success
among the Yanomamo, and that the linkage is generalizable; and second, that the
claim was rejected by the anthropological community for ideological reasons,
involving the rejection of science itself.
The New York Times has
articulated these claims uncritically several times in the last few weeks; but
both are false, and the second one in particular is pernicious.

Can we
generalize from Napoleon Chagnon’s demonstration that murder and babies are
correlated?

Second
part first. What would it mean if
Yanomamo murderers outbred non-murderers?
Well, if you believe that this is a bi-allelic system, then the Yanomamo
murderer alleles would quickly swamp out the non-murderer alleles. But of course only a fucking idiot would
believe that. If you believe that the genetic differences between murderers and non-murderers are random, then the Yanomamo
might have a trivial bit of transient microevolutionary things going on. But if the reproductive bias isn’t consistent
over generations, it would have no significant microevolutionary effect at all.

Yet
obviously we are not talking about multi-generational data here, simply a
snapshot of one point in time. So even
on its best day, these data could not testify to the microevolutionary activity
of selection. It could simply be a blip
in Yanomamo demography.

And
can we actually say with certainty that the relationship between killers and
babies held for those people at that time?
In the journal American Ethologist
in 1989, Brian Ferguson pointed out that Chagnon’s data are incomplete, because
he did not present data on the reproduction of
killers who had themselves been killed. This is important to someone who thinks deeply
about evolution, because killing is risky, and if the reproductive bias is
offset by a mortality bias, then there would be no net evolutionary
effect. Chagnon was not able to present
these data, but waved his hands when a journalist for Science magazine wrote it up over a decade ago.

But, Chagnon toldScience, he
“didn't record at the time the status ofunokaimen who were killed,” which is
necessary to respond to Ferguson ....
“But from what I know,” he says, “it looks as though [Ferguson's] hypothesis doesn't hold up.”

No,
Chagnon is the one with a hypothesis, and his data are statistically inadequate
to either confirm or deny it. Moreover, when
Nicholas Wade writes, “Dr. Chagnon
said he was familiar with those criticisms but called them invalid and said
none had been published in a peer-reviewed journal” he puts an unchallenged falsehood in
Chagnon’s mouth in support of this poor scientific reasoning.

Further,
from an analysis of the data Chagnon presented, Douglas Fry was able to find an
apparent 10-year average difference between the killers and the
non-killers. Of course the older sample
are going to have more children than the younger sample, duh. If Chagnon didn’t control for age, then any
reproductive contrast between killers and non-killers is meaningless. As Miklikowska and Fry document in a recent article, all Chagnon could do was deny that it was true, but he never produced
the data to show it. In science, if you
make a claim, you have to demonstrate its validity and do the proper
controls. Or else shut up. Really.

That’s
not an extravagant demand; it is an expectation. Back when I was a post-doc in molecular
genetics in the 1980s, and we were studying the best-known part of the human
genome at the time, the hemoglobin genes, we claimed to have found a hitherto
unknown hemoglobin gene. It was a pretty
bold claim. And by golly, we had to
produce all of our evidence and show that we had done all the proper controls,
and that our conclusion was the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the
data, before Nature would publish it. If Napoleon Chagnon wants to be judged by the
standards of good science, those are the standards his claim has to face; and
it fails miserably.

Now
the first part. What on earth is the
basis for thinking that any pattern found among the Yanomamo a generation ago,
unless you are yourself a Yanomamo, can be reasonably understood as a surrogate
for your own ancestors? In order to generalize
like that, you would have to cast the Yanomamo adrift from global geopolitics,
pretend that that they are ahistorical, and use these modern South American
horticulturalists as metaphorical stand-ins for Upper Pleistocene
hunter-gatherers. In short, that would
be a pre-modern and incompetent form of anthropological reasoning.

Nicholas
Wade, a tireless supporter of Chagnon’s in The
New York Times, explains that “he seemed to be saying that aggression was rewarded and could be inherited.” Saying
that is permissible, but deriving it from this dataset is incompetent. Elsewhere Chagnon’s work has been brandished
not so much as Wade sees it, supporting genetic diversity (killers versus non-killers), but in
support of genetic uniformity (the Yanomamo represent an “acting out” of the basic
human nature that we all share). But if
human biology is a constant, then it is not explanatory. You can’t use a constant to explain a
variable in science. Why would the
Yanomamo be acting it out and not the Danes?
Could it be for historical and political reasons?

There
may certainly be generalizations to be made about the common form of social
life of early people from the ethnographic observation of contemporary
hunter-gatherers, but those generalizations are very broad and non-specific,
because they have to incorporate the particular histories and local ecologies of
the people being studied. After all,
people act not simply as humans, but as humans of a particular time and place
and life experiences (we tend to call that culture). Consequently, we are far more circumspect today about de-historicizing the !Kung San (everybody’s favorite
hunter-gatherers, in southern Africa) than we were a few decades ago. And that is why we understand the Yanomamo and what they do as products of history and politics, because there certainly
is a lot of history and politics going on to affect their behavior. Anyone who wants to argue that the behavior
they observe in anybody has no historical origin or political context, but is a
dislocated manifestation of an uncultural human nature, will not be taken
seriously by a community of scholars of human behavior, unless they can really
unambiguously prove their point.

To
recap:

·Chagnon’s
data do not warrant the conclusion that Yanomamo killers statistically out-bred
non-killers.

·If a
statistical relationship were there, as a synchronic datum it would not warrant
the conclusion that it is of evolutionary relevance in Yanomamo society.

·If it were
of evolutionary relevance in Yanomamo society, it would not warrant the conclusion
that it is applicable to early Holocene societies of Asians, Africans,
Europeans, Oceanics, North Americans, or other South Americans.

·Consequently,
anyone who argues from Chagnon’s data to early Holocene human societies is not showing
evidence of intellectual competence in this area.

Was
Chagnon’s work rejected out of an anti-science ideological bias in anthropology?

Are you fucking kidding me? Say that out loud and hear how stupid it
sounds.

Nicholas Wade explains it to us. “In 2010the
A.A.A. votedto strip the word ‘science’ from its
long-range mission plan and focus instead on ‘public understanding.’ Its distaste for science and its attack on Dr.
Chagnon are now an indelible part of its record.” That is pretty much true, except for the
omission of one word: “not”. The
AAA voted not to strip the word “science” from its long range plan. Yes, it was suggested (to emphasize the breadth
of the scope of anthropology beyond the boundaries of science and encompassing
the humanities as well); yes, it was put to a vote (because there was some
feeling that it was a bad idea); and yes,
it was voted down. That’s quite a
slander against anthropology from The New
York Times.

In fact, the suggestion that anthropology is
under a delusional cloud is one that we are more accustomed to hearing from
creationists and other anti-intellectuals.
For example, that’s not the first time those charges have appeared in
print in The New York Times. In a letter they published on October 24, 1962, two segregationists wrote that the “race-equality dogma” was part of a
“socialistic ideology” promoted by a “cult” of anthropologists. Except that the “cult” was actually the
mainstream science of anthropology, and that claim was a highly political and
anti-intellectual dissimulation. It
still is.

There has been an ideological war going on for a
long time, between anthropological science and
sociobiology-cum-evolutionary-psychology.
The problem is that anthropology has let the other side speak, largely
unchallenged, on behalf of science. So The New York Times tells us,

In his view, evolution and sociobiology, ... it made perfect sense that the struggle among
the Yanomamö, and probably among all human societies at such a stage in their
history, was for reproductive advantage.

That’s an interesting ideological position, but
it isn’t supported empirically, it ignores historical and political causes, and
it no more represents evolutionary science than social darwinism or eugenics
did. We have been here before;
douchebags are always recruiting Darwin to their stupid views about human
society. Frances Galton did; Ernst
Haeckel did; Charles Davenport did; Georges Vacher de Lapouge did; Robert Ardrey did; the late Phil Rushton did; and Steven Pinker still does.

Actually
(as pointed out to me by Seth Dobson from Dartmouth), that’s not sociobiology,
that’s anthropology! How could
you possibly beat up Sahlins as a denier of evolution and culture when he
actually once co-edited a book called Evolution and Culture?

Here’s something
Wade actually gets right: “The two men have been at odds for decades over the validity of sociobiology”. But nobody – not even sociobiologists – still believe what they were saying back in
the late 1970s, when they initially chose to position themselves against
anthropology. Richard Dawkins casually explained
at the end of The Selfish Gene that
human behavior was not bound by the dictates of genetic maximization principles
because the spread of imaginary cultural “memes” could oppose and overwhelm the imaginary genetic
propensities he had been writing about.
Various second-wave sociobiologists have picked up on that, but the
theory that humans maximize their memetic fitness is essentially a cultural alternative to the idea that humans maximize their genetic fitness. Which means that you can’t assume humans are
maximizing their genetic fitness, which means that the central tenet of sociobiology
– that an “evolutionary” explanation of human behavior begins with the
assumption that human behavior is intended to maximize genetic fitness – is wrong. E. O. Wilson now believes in group
selection. And as Sahlins pointed out
years ago, in order for kin selection to explain human behavior, human
societies would have to define kin in approximately the same way that nature
does – and they don’t.

All sciences were equally guilty of premature theories of evolution
based on observed homologies and supposed similarities. The theories had to be
revised again and again, as the slow progress of empirical knowledge of the
data of evolution proved their fallacy.

And this was before
the eugenicists, much less the sociobiologists.
And before you call Boas anti-science, let me remind you that he was a
President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931-1932.
There he is now, accepting the
presidency of the AAAS from his predecessor, the geneticist Thomas Hunt
Morgan, who worked in the same building at Columbia as Boas for many
years. Morgan never called Boas
anti-science; the eugenicists did.

The other
anthropologist who presided over the AAAS in the 20th century is also the other one that sociobiologists try to discredit: Margaret Mead. [That’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? The two anthropologists whom sociobiologists
are most keen to discredit as being anti-science, were both Presidents of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.] After her death she was hounded by a
sociobiologist nutternamed Derek Freeman.
Freeman believed that Margaret Mead’s 1928 book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was false, for she had been hoaxed, which
in turn undermined all of the rest of her life’s work and indeed all 20th
century anthropology, and thus proved sociobiology to be right. The sociobiologists regularly cite that,
including the entire stream of illogical consequences, quite uncritically. In fact, even Emily Eakin repeated it in The New York Timesin her story on
Chagnon.

In 1983, the New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman delivered a
major blow when he published “Margaret Mead and Samoa,” charging that Mead had
been duped by informants in her pioneering ethnography, “Coming of Age in
Samoa.”

Actually The New York Times has repeated Derek Freeman’s
charges over a half-dozen times since
1983, most recently (before Eakin’s article on Chagnon) in Freeman’s 2001
obituary. The only time they’ve told
readers that his charges were, as far as anybody could tell, total bullshit –
was in a letter published in response to the Freeman obit, by the AAA President, Louise Lamphere. She summarized tersely and politely: “Most serious scholarship casts grave doubt
on his data and theory.”

And yet, zombie
Freeman is allowed to rise again in this article, in defense of Napoleon
Chagnon, without any qualification whatsoever?
That might be a clue that this is a rhetorical and ideological battle,
not an empirical scientific one. Emily Eakin serves as a mouthpiece for Napoleon Chagnon without even acknowledging the problems with his work. Nicholas Wade weighs in twice in the space of two weeks on Chagnon’s behalf, and discredits the
science of anthropology. As I noted in
my last entry, his relevant book was judged to be social Darwinism by reviewers in Nature; I think he’s got a horse in this
race.

To recap:

· Science, evolution, and anthropology are all on
the same side. The other side is where the anti-intellectuals
and ideologues are, and have always been, the ones who either don’t understand evolution themselves,
or are knowingly misrepresenting its implications to the public. As I said, that is a recurrent theme in the
history of this intellectual engagement.

· In
fact, I’ll revise that thought: Science,
evolution, anthropology, and history are all on the same side.

For The New York Times to promote Chagnon’s
anti-intellectual nonsense unchallenged, as if it represented evolution, much
less science, is a terrible, terrible mistake. And for them to allow Nicholas Wade to conduct his intellectual war against the science of anthropology in their pages is outrageous.

Well well well. When asked in 1978-9 to challenge Wilson's Socio-biology from the perspective of assumptions about female subjugation as a function of genes and biology (shared by many anthropologists as well as an entemologist then, I asked "why are you asking me to Interrupt my I was sure groundbreaking work to beat an old Trojan horse back into its grave?". I did a pretty good job tho ((AAAS proceedings 1979) Wilson came to my campus to be feted by my president, nixon's secy of HEW. This was U of Ala. I invented calling vote of confidence by faculty in a univ pres. End of my and David Matthews (the Pres) academic lives. Sad to see Trojan horse up and galloping. I think more a reflection of current who thinks which way the Politcal financial wind is blowing funding than leaps of clarity in my absence. I always loved and still cite Sahlins whose letter re etymology of tribe (paid tribute to Rome) I found when Tapson Mwere, preparing to negotiate the end of Rhodesia for ZANU asked me to find out where the notion tribe "we didn't use before" came from

Hopefully more people will eventually realize how fucking dumb some science reporters/journalists tend to be.

What's sad, is that Wade's book is the type of book that is picked up by uncritical and uninformed minds. Even in this day, normal people don't know what anthropology is or does -- and not even scholars by the looks of it!